{"id":6557,"date":"2014-12-06T12:05:02","date_gmt":"2014-12-06T17:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6557"},"modified":"2014-12-07T13:58:00","modified_gmt":"2014-12-07T18:58:00","slug":"worse-than-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6557","title":{"rendered":"Worse than racism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, in New York City, a man named Eric Garner was strangled to death on the street by police.  It was all caught on video. It was a nightmare sequence that made me think of George Orwell&#8217;s description of the future in 1984: a boot stamping on a human face, forever.<\/p>\n<p>Eric Garner was black. The policeman who choked him to death was white.<\/p>\n<p>Some people want to make this horror about race.  I find myself wishing they were right &#8211; that just once, the racial grievance peddlers weren&#8217;t basically making up inflammatory crap that canonizes thug trash like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Because as bad as violent racism is, I&#8217;m afraid that what actually killed Eric Garner was something far worse.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The truly terrifying thing about Eric Garner&#8217;s death is that I don&#8217;t think the cops in that video hated anybody. They were just doing their job.  And their job included strangling a man to death for having sold &#8220;loosies&#8221; &#8211; untaxed cigarettes.  Something he <em>wasn&#8217;t<\/em> doing when he was killed; he had just broken up a fight that the police came to investigate. <\/p>\n<p>Garner had just broken up a fight. The police hassled him, based on his record as a (gasp!) vendor of untaxed cigarettes, and when he protested the force of law came down on him and snuffed him.<\/p>\n<p>In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a book called <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Soft_despotism\">Democracy In America<\/a> that has been justly celebrated for its perception about the young American republic ever since. In it, he warned of the dangers of what he called &#8220;soft despotism&#8221; &#8211; that &#8220;covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules&#8221;, all justified in soothing ways to achieve worthy objectives.  Such as discouraging people from smoking by heavily taxing cigarettes.<\/p>\n<p>Eric Garner died in a New York minute because &#8220;soft despotism&#8221; turned hard enough to kill him in cold blood. There was no anger there, no hate; the police simply failed to grasp the moral disproportion between the &#8220;crimes&#8221; he wasn&#8217;t even committing at the time and their use of force. And an investigating grand jury did no better.<\/p>\n<p>Violent racists, as evil as they are, generally understand on some level that they&#8217;re doing wrong. That understanding is written all over the excuses they make. These cops didn&#8217;t need an excuse.  They were doing their job. They were enforcing the law.  The casual, dispassionate, machinelike brutality with which Garner was strangled reveals a moral vacuum more frightening than mere racism could ever be.<\/p>\n<p>Every one of the soft despots who passed that law should be arraigned for the murder of Eric Garner.  They directed the power of the state to frivolous ends, forgetting &#8211; or worse, probably not caring &#8211; that the enforcement of those &#8220;small complicated rules&#8221; depends on the gun, the truncheon, and the chokehold.  In a truly just universe they would be strangled and their bodies buried under Garner&#8217;s, <em>pour encourager les autres<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>But we are all accessories before the fact.  Because we elected them.  We ceded them the power to pass oh, so <em>many<\/em> well-intentioned laws, criminalizing so much behavior that one prominent legal analyst has concluded the average American commits three inadvertent felonies a day.<\/p>\n<p>That could be <em>you<\/em> on that New York sidewalk.  De Tocqueville thought that what prevented soft despotism in America was &#8220;habits of the heart&#8221; &#8211; the dignified refusal of Americans to submit to petty tyrannies, and their vigilance against the habits of mind that lead to oppression.<\/p>\n<p>Eric Garner&#8217;s death calls us to renew that vigilence.  To demand that the force of law only be deployed against crimes that are actual <em>crimes<\/em> &#8211; that is, identifiable wrongs committed against identifiable victims, in which the moral costs and risks of enforcement are not greater than the harm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, in New York City, a man named Eric Garner was strangled to death on the street by police. It was all caught on video. It was a nightmare sequence that made me think of George Orwell&#8217;s description of the future in 1984: a boot stamping on a human face, forever. Eric Garner was black.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6557\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Worse than racism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6557"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6564,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6557\/revisions\/6564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}